"5 Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. To draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools, for they do not know that they are doing evil. 2 Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore let your words be few. 3 For a dream comes with much busyness, and a fool's voice with many words.
4 When you vow a vow to God, do not delay paying it, for he has no pleasure in fools. Pay what you vow. 5 It is better that you should not vow than that you should vow and not pay. 6 Let not your mouth lead you into sin, and do not say before the messenger that it was a mistake. Why should God be angry at your voice and destroy the work of your hands? 7 For when dreams increase and words grow many, there is vanity; but God is the one you must fear."
Ecclesiastes 5:1-7
The New Bible Dictionary analysis (given earlier in these Notes) entitles this section, 'The nature of the true worshipper', but it may be that something else is in mind, namely, the emptiness and futility of what might be called 'religiosity', and that it is only by implication that true religion is in view. It has to be recognised, as one commentator points out, that secularised man in any age - whether in those far off days or in our own time - is by no means averse to religion. The Sadducees in New Testament times are the primary evidence of this. Religion was part of the established order of things for them, a social convenience, as it is so often today. The Sadducees were the religious rationalists of the day: they did not believe in the supernatural, they did not believe in miracles, they did not believe in resurrection; but they believed in religion. For them it was socially acceptable, and even more, a status symbol. And whenever and wherever this obtains, there is a tendency to 'make use' of God, to treat Him as an ally (of the establishment), an anodyne or an insurance agency. This is well summed up in a scathing critique written by a one time President of the Union of American Hebrew congregations of American religiosity (and surely equally applicable in our own land): 'Man is the beginning and end of present-day American religiosity - God is made to serve, or rather to subserve man, to subserve his every purpose and enterprise whether it be economic prosperity, free enterprise, security, or peace of mind. God thus becomes an omnipotent servant, a universal bellhop, to cater to man's every caprice: faith becomes a sure-fire device to get what we petulantly and peevishly crave. This reduction of God from master to slave has reached its height, or rather its depth of blasphemy, in the cult of the Man Upstairs - the friendly neighbour-god who dwells in the apartment just above. Call on him any time - especially if you are feeling blue. He does not get the least bit upset with your faults and failings and, as for your sins, not only does he not remember them ... but the very word and concept of sin have been abolished and 'adjustment' or 'non-adjustment' have taken their places.'